This article assesses the current risk of war on the Korean peninsula in light of renewed North-South, US-North and US-China tensions in the wake of the US decision to implement the THAAD program in South Korea, current US-ROK military exercises, and North Korea's recent nuclear test. It suggests a course in which political initiatives overcome recent military moves that increase tensions in the region.

This article looks at contemporary Japanese nationalism in the context of growing far-right movements within democratic societies around the world, notably in Europe and North America, and the general rejection of the “happy globalization” narrative that has shaped the international order since the end of the Cold War. Japan, which witnessed the birth of the “borderless world” metaphor in the 1990s, is now contributing in its own way to the early twenty-first century worldwide longing for strong borders and an aggressive military posture. The rise of ultra-conservatism in democratic societies cannot be reduced to a “Western problem”; by taking into account the political transformation of a country such as Japan it is possible to consider a truly global phenomenon with far-reaching consequences.

During the Japanese colonial period, over a million men were taken from Korea to labor at sites across Japan and South Pacific islands; over 145,000 of them were sent to Hokkaido. There, many of them were worked to death, and some were buried in the woods. Around the time of Chusok (Korean Thanksgiving) in 2015, Korean and Japanese volunteer organizations escorted the remains of 115 young Korean men from Hokkaido, Japan to Seoul, Korea. The journey back home took the route they had taken 70 years earlier. Crossing the Japanese archipelago from north to south, a ceremony of remembrance was held in every major city en route. After the arrival ceremony at the Korean port of their departure, Busan, and an official funeral at the Seoul City Plaza, the victims, who had been abandoned and forgotten in the woods of Hokkaido, were finally buried properly in their homeland.

Suzuki Yūichi (56) was born to a farming family in Namie, Fukushima in 1960. Namie was one of the areas most devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Besides 565 deaths from the earthquake/tsunami, because the town was located within the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power plant, the entire town was evacuated on March 12. The government of Namie continued to operate in Nihonmatsu-city 39 kilometers from Namie. At the time of the nuclear accident, Mr. Suzuki was working in the Citizens' Affairs Division of Namie and was immediately assigned to the Disaster Management Division established to assist citizens in finding missing family members, locating temporary housing, and evacuating families. Suzuki was subsequently responsible for decontamination efforts, return policies, and establishing clinics for prospective returnees. In the summer and the winter of 2016, I visited Namie with my colleagues Professor Yoshihiro Amaya of Niigata University and Yoh Kawano, a PhD candidate at UCLA, to interview Mr. Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki contends that the majority of former residents of Namie are unlikely to return to the town even after the Japanese government lifts the restriction on residency in certain areas on March 31, 2017.

This article reviews the potential for United States accession to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) under the current U.S. leadership, the administration of President Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. The strategic significance of U.S. ratification of UNCLOS is demonstrated by U.S. claims and rights in areas subject to geopolitical contestation such as the Arctic and South China Sea. More broadly, the United States has a compelling interest in preserving the international order and protecting the global commons, as embodied in the terms of the treaty. Despite clear evidence that ratification is in the U.S. national interest, UNCLOS faces the obstacle of continued Senate inaction and the challenge of a domestic political atmosphere suspicious of international law and institutions. President Trump, as a Republican leader and populist dealmaker, may be well-positioned to overcome domestic political opposition and achieve a vital U.S. foreign policy objective that has eluded his White House predecessors.

Medoruma Shun, widely recognized as Okinawa's leading novelist, has published a new novel, translated by Takuma Sminkey as In the Woods of Memory, set in the Battle of Okinawa and on the sixtieth anniversary of the battle. The Asia-Pacific Journal is proud to publish the first chapter of the novel and an introduction to Medoruma's work.

USMC handbooks and reports obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act casts new light on environmental accidents that occurred on three of the USMC's most important installations on Okinawa: MCAS Futenma, Camp Hansen and Camp Schwab. The earliest report is dated June 2002 and the most recent June 2016. Of the 270 accidents, it appears that only 6 were reported to Japanese authorities - 3 of which because the USMC required the help of local emergency services to clean up. This report examines the environmental contamination resulting from these accidents and the handling of the cases by the USMC authorities.

This is the story of the arrest and detention of anti-base activist leader Yamashiro Hiroji, his role in the struggle to prevent the construction of a new US Marine base at Henoko, and the implications for Japanese democracy of his protracted detention without trial for Gavan McCormack, “Yamashiro Hiroji and the Okinawan Anti-Base Struggle”. It concludes with the “Emergency Statement by 41 Criminal Law Scholars Demanding the Release of Yamashiro Hiroji”

Ever since the end of America's Vietnam catastrophe, experts on both sides of the Pacific have sounded warnings about anachronistic, wasteful, and dangerously misguided U.S. military policies, seemingly perpetuated by inertia, in East Asia. Yet their recommendations are ignored and new policy initiatives thwarted. As a candidate for president in early 1975, Jimmy Carter advocated removing U.S. forces from South Korea. Of Carter's meeting that year with researchers at the Brookings Institution, Senior Fellow Barry M. Blechman recalled, “I told Carter we should take out the nukes (nuclear weapons) right off and phase out the ground troops over four or five years. I said the most important reason was to avoid getting the U.S. involved with ground forces almost automatically in a new war which is, of course, why the South Koreans want them there.” However, Major General John K. Singlaub, U.S. Forces Korea Chief of Staff at the time, publicly criticized Carter's proposed withdrawal and CIA Director Stansfield Turner privately expressed misgivings. It was never implemented.

The Japanese manga and animation industry was established under special conditions in the high growth period of the 1960's. At that time the domestic market of the publishing industry and the film industry was large, the literacy rate was high, other entertainment was little developed, and the industry did not yet confront the challenges of globalization. However, the industrial structure established during this period has deteriorated to one that exploits creators who have weak bargaining power. This reflects the situation throughout Japanese society in the sense that the social structure originating in the 1960s has lost flexibility, creating dysfunction and growing disparities.

This article demonstrates how travel writers take on the roles of historians during and after their journeys. The manner in which they exercise their roles varies in their understanding of the past, the articulation of personal values, and aspirations for the present and the future. To highlight both the commonalities and the variations, consider three commercially published Japanese travelogues to southwestern Pacific Islands. The article shows how the travellers' diverse motivations and approaches are reflected in their historical consciousness. The journeys also shaped their perspectives on the relations between Japan and the Pacific Islands, and their raison d'être.

Much ecological thought today turns to Japan's past for inspiration. The reason, according to conservative Japanese ecologists, deep ecologists, and environmental philosophers, is that Japan's history of aesthetic “oneness” with nature provides a model for the world to emulate as it addresses the global environmental crisis. I critique this view by showing that conservative, or more accurately, reactionary ecology in Japan is closely intertwined with ethnic communitarianism, Japan's wartime ideology of the 1930s, and deep ecology. I suggest that these forms of reactionary ecology reflect a fascist desire to create or rely upon a nationalistic narrative of Japanese cultural uniqueness that conceals the excesses of capitalism and operates to sustain the socio-economic order that is today generating ecological catastrophe.

This two-part article reconsiders the legacy of Dr. Seuss as presented in the new Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield, against the author's little known wartime cartoon representations of the Japanese. It represents important questions about the representation of writers, heroes, even the beloved, in their finest and least memorable moments.

Viet Nam’s indigenous environment has long played a key role in its history and culture. My new book, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, begins with a quotation: “‘Mountains are like the bones of the earth. Water is its blood,’ wrote a Vietnamese geographer in 1820. Lowland Viet Nam is aquatic.”1

This unannotated essay was written for Okinawan readers of the Ryūkyū Shimpō, where it appeared in translation in four installments on September 25, 27, 29 and October 3, 2017. It has been slightly compressed for readers of the APJ. Dower's observations are addressed at length in his recent annotated book The Violent American Century (Haymarket/Dispatch Books), which will be published in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten in a translation by Yuki Tanaka in November.

This article introduces the Japanese Furusato Nozei Tax System, whereby citizens can designate part of their tax burden to be transferred to as a financial contribution to a prefecture or municipality of their choice, thereby creating an alternative means of taxation. Given that the Furusato Nozei System is gaining widespread popularity, this paper investigates some of its inherent contradictions, its rationale, history and certain paradoxical features of this controversial tax system.

In April 2015, I was invited by the Cercle des Francophones (Francophone Association) of Hanoi to present the film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) at Hanoi Cinémathèque. The film was made collectively in 1967 by some of the great names of new French cinéma: Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, in support of Vietnam's resistance to US aggression.

Nippon Kaigi [The Japan Conference], established in 1997, is the largest right-wing organization in Japan. The organization is a major supporter of the current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, and both Japanese and foreign media report that Abe, and many of his cabinet, are prominent member of its Diet Members League. Despite Nippon Kaigi's influence on governmental policies of Japan, the organization was little known to the general public until 2015. In 2016, however, numerous books and magazine articles focusing on Nippon Kaigi were published, some becoming best sellers. This created a “Nippon Kaigi boom” in the publishing world.

China's continuing shift to green sources of electric power generation is confirmed in the latest data published by the National Energy Administration (NEA) and the China Electricity Council (CEC). New capacity additions in the first half of 2017 have seen the proportion of capacity added sourced from water, wind and sun (WWS) reaching 70%, with thermal capacity added being reduced to 28% and nuclear to just 2%. Overall, the China electric power system has swung from one that was dependent on WWS sources for just 20% in 2007 to 35% in 2017 (1H) – an astonishing 15% swing in just a decade. Meanwhile actual electric energy generated in 1H 2017 remains heavily dependent on thermal sources to the extent of 75%, with WWS accounting for 21% and nuclear for 4%. The system is greening at the margin (in terms of new additions) but it still remains a large fossil-fuelled system.

This article assesses the expansive internationalization of China's energy role and inquires to what extent it is contributing to the export of greenhouse gases or a renewable energy future in Asia and beyond.